Actor Mark Ruffalo has lashed out at podcaster Joe Rogan for playing dumb about Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies.
Rogan, who endorsed Trump and interviewed him during the campaign on his hugely popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast, said it’s “insane” that non-criminal migrant workers have been rounded up during large-scale Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
“The targeting of migrant workers—not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers. Just construction workers. Showing up at construction sites, raiding them. Gardeners,” Rogan said during an interview with tech entrepreneur Amjad Masad. “Like, really?”
Ruffalo, a longtime critic of Trump and his policies, suggested Rogan shouldn’t be surprised that Trump would carry out mass deportations, as they are laid out in the conservative manifesto Project 2025.
“Dear Joe Rogan, it’s a little late now to pretend like Project 2025 didn’t exist and wasn’t the playbook all along,” Ruffalo wrote on Threads. “You are either not that smart or not that dumb. It’s hard to tell at this point.”
The actor was replying to a post from the progressive news site The Tennessee Holler, which condemned Rogan for endorsing Trump in the 2024 election. “You were warned repeatedly, yet you helped get him elected and helped let this happen,” the post read. “It’s good that you’re speaking up, but please be honest with yourself about the role you played here.”
A representative for Rogan did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
Project 2025 is a 922-page manifesto written by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and outlines how a potential Republican administration could overhaul the federal government.
Trump has repeatedly denied any connection to Project 2025, despite multiple members of his Cabinet—along with his border czar, Tom Homan—being involved in drafting the playbook. Many of the president’s policies enacted during his second term, including carrying out mass deportations and scrapping diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, appear in Project 2025.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, rejected claims that the Trump administration wasn’t targeting hardened criminals with its deportation plans.
“An overwhelming majority of ICE arrests were criminal illegal aliens with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges,” McLaughlin said. “Further, many illegal aliens categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members, and worse—they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S. This deceptive ‘non-criminal’ categorization is devoid of reality and misleads the American public.”
